There has been quite a bit of discussion about USAID since Trump supposedly defunded it soon after his inauguration. Many of you may not know that I worked on 5 different USAID contracts over a period of six years in Kosovo, Bosnia, Moldova and the Republic of Georgia. In order to give a better understanding of what USAID does (at least in my specialty area of agriculture), I am going to write down my thoughts below:
1) While they said USAID is defunded, it really hasn’t been yet. Yes, the probationary people have been let go, but all others (unless they took the buy-out) are still being paid. They are on administrative leave, supposedly working from home. My question is – how are we saving as much money as possible if the employees are still at home getting paid? We are not paying out any money to the USAID contractors & cooperators – so there will be some massive savings from that — but if there are no contractors or cooperators connected to USAID, what are the employees doing while “working from home?”
2) I worked in Kosovo for 2.5 years – first for IFDC as Association/Agribusiness Advisor and later with Chemonics as Agriculture Advisor. With IFDC, I worked with three associations – The Fertilizer Dealers Assn, the Flour Millers Assn and the Poultry Producers/Feed Millers Assn. My job was to teach them how to run an organization, lobby the government, learn business training skills and do joint purchasing/sales of international products.
GOOD – We helped the Fertilizer Dealers Assn access EU a bank loan to import fall fertilizer for the 2001 winter wheat crop. Because there was no mortgage law, we had each of the 12 dealers who were importing co-sign for the others. I was the one who came up with this unique approach and by spring-time, one dealer had not paid his loan. The others met at his place, took the fertilizer that had not been sold and then sold it – paying off his debt. He was responsible for what was left, which he paid. There were four of us about the same age working four three different agencies – all in agriculture. We were affectionately known as “The Ag Mafia” even though I was the only one with any ag experience. Three of us worked for IFDC. When funding started to dry up, I convinced my boss to encourage another USAID project that was starting the American Bank of Kosovo to hire the guy who was getting let go. The concept was that we would help our agriculture clients to do some basic business plans and financial analysis and they would then take this to ABK to basically be pre-approved for a loan. It worked great and was a wonderful example of intercooperation between USAID contracts – something that rarely happened.
BAD – Up to this point, I had the worst boss I had ever had. Screamed & yelled at everyone, probably an alcoholic and I heard later he got ousted from his USAID contracting job in Afghanistan for pedophilia with young boys (didn’t go to jail – just lost his job). He also made us exclude one of the fertilizer dealers from the co-signing group. Guess which one didn’t pay. Guess who probably got a pay-off for making this happen.
3) After the gig was up, I got a job with Chemonics as Agriculture Advisor.
GOOD – We were training agbusinesses how to do business plans, but it wasn’t going that well since I had already trained a bunch of them when working at IFDC & it was hard to find new clients. I then spent time training some of the employees about the intricacies of agriculture financing. I left after 9 months to take a job in Bosnia.
BAD – I wanted them to put all their sector reports on the web. They said no, these were only for USAID internally.
WORSE – I don’t remember the exact specifics, but the agbusiness portion of the USAID contract was coming up to be re-bid. There were something like 14 proposals and there was a team of 4-5 people (one of whom worked for USAID) that reviewed & ranked them. Four of the five committee members had 2-3 of them at the top and another one (lets call it the MC proposal) at the bottom of the list while the USAID guy had the MC proposal at the top of the list. Guess who the USAID guy was sleeping with – you got it, the country director who submitted the MC proposal. I later heard he was working for USAID Iraq and was sleeping with one of his direct USAID reports. Did he get fired? Nope – just got sent back to work for USAID in WDC.
4) In Bosnia, I worked for ARD, Inc on the Linking Agricultural Markets to Producers (LAMP project) from 2003-2006 as Branch Manager and later Deputy Chief of Party (like Deputy Country Director). Other than working for myself, this was the best job I have ever had. I had the best boss of my life, great co-workers and outstanding employees. The project started with brainstorming in a Sarajevo hotel & then after four days, I loaded my wife & 4-month-old son into a car with a guy I just met & drove 2.5 hours north to Tuzla, BiH. My assistant branch manager & I were in charge of finding an office, getting computers, etc. & hiring staff. We hired about 8 people – some Croats, some Serbs & some Bosniaks – & they all worked well together. We chose the sectors in which we would work by doing several sub-sector analyses.
GREAT – We helped a women’s widow’s association get access to bulk milk tanks. This association became the largest supplier of milk to Tuzla Dairy (and still was as of 2 years ago) and it all started with us. We helped set up an elementary Dairy Herd Improvement Program and did some great nutritional training with farmers.
GOOD1 – I don’t remember the number exactly and cannot check my LinkedIN page, but we trained something like 14,000 farmers by making the various Croat/Serb/Bosniak and their Ministries of Ag/Vet Institutes/Ag Institutes work together to do the training. The first year we helped them do it with assistance from US experts & the second year we got them to charge the farmers a small fee to do it (to encourage self-sustainability) & it was largely self-funded by year 3. We also did a great job of training on berry production. Before the war, Yugoslavia was responsible for something like 40% of the world trade in raspberries. When we got there, this was basically all gone and the market had been picked up by Chile. The entire company raised one variety of raspberry (Willamette), so you had massive unemployment for 48 weeks of the year and then everyone was scrambling to pick all the berries in a 4-week period. Of course, there was not enough freezing capacity to freeze all of these berries at the same time, something we helped with over the life of the project.
GOOD2 – After 2 years, I moved to Mostar in the southern part of BiH. I hired a new person to work with the 23 members of the wine association to help them create and manage the association, build a wine tourist map & do a couple other things that I don’t remember right now. Nevertheless, what we did with them was very good & quite remarkable.
GOOD3 – All the other projects I had worked with up to now wrote lots of reports and submitted them to USAID. I remember saying that these should be put on a website so everyone had access to them in order to have good data & make good decisions. The other projects refused to do it, saying that USAID was our client & all we had to do was provide them with the reports. Luckily, my new boss and new company loved the idea and we put all of our reports on the website so everyone had access. What a novel idea!
GOOD4 – We completed enterprise budgets for something like 16 fruit & vegetables – kinda like the enterprise budgets provided by OSU (where do you think the idea came from?). Lots of people wanted to grow wheat and we were trying to convince them to produce something with much higher value and then buy their flour. Showing on paper how much money could be made growing various fruits & vegetables helped move farmers into these sectors. We tied them to F&V processing companies to do forward contracts with these buyers. We also connected these farmers to microcredit organizations (MCO’s) with whom we were working to get credit so the small farmers could grow these crops. Tuzla was also home to Eagle Base – the US base nearby. When meeting with their people one time, they said they needed something to hand out to people when they were doing patrols. We gave them the enterprise budgets and a list of the MCO’s that were providing credit. The Army was very appreciative of this.
GOOD5 – When USAID/LAMP came to Bosnia, there was a great deal of concern that because we were such a large project, we would disrupt the other organizations working there. I specificially remember an Italian NGO, Lutheran World Federation & a few other groups. Soon after arriving, I organized all of them to meet and agreed that we would not step on their toes, but would try to assist where possible. All of these groups started meeting monthly and I don’t remember exactly what we called the group (I think it was Ag Donor Council), but we worked very well together and assisted each other to a great deal. Too lengthy to type up the hows of it all, but it was a very good thing that we did there.
BAD1 (see GOOD1 above) – In conjunction with a US berry specialist, we developed a plan to grow multiple varieties of berries, where a family of 5 could grow something like 6-7 different varieties of berries – all ripening at a different time from late June through October so that the family would be busy for about 5 months picking these various berry varieties to sell in the market, which were now coming to market at a different time than the ever-present Willamette variety. This got shot down by someone at USAID. Who might you ask? An Ag Specialist? The Head of Mission? No, a Bosnian person with no ag experience. She feared that the different varieties might not grow there. We are not talking about a different species – just a different variety. I replied that they were growing at the Cacak Institute, a world-renown berry institute 1.5 hours away in Serbia – just across the river. She asked how we knew they would grow in Bosnia. My response was that corn grown in Ohio still grew across the border in Indiana. We got shut down by someone whose only experience was that they were probably the first English speaking person someone from USAID met when they came to start the office 12 years previous. This person set the industry back by 5+ years when what she should have done is trusted us as we were hired to be the ag specialists. I remember she asked how much ag experience I had. I told her about 20 generations worth since farming was all my family had ever done.
BAD2 – We had the opportunity to provide a grant for some livestock for the dairy sector. We were proposing hardy Holsteins or Guernsey/Jersey cattle because this was a couple steps better than the milking Simmental that they had. We had worked with a farmer north of Tuzla who had four different breeds of cattle that he was milking. As part of the DHIA project, he had determined that the Holstein cows he was milking was producing exactly twice as much milk as his Simmentals. Again, we were shot down by the same Bosnian lady because she said that these new breeds of cattle might not do well in BiH & it would look bad for the US. We explained that there was a farm already in Bosnia raising them and they were doing remarkably well. Such a shame for our expertise to be shot down by someone so ignorant while simultaneously PREVENTING the very agricultural development we were hired to provide & encourage.
WORSE – The LAMP project was recognized as being in the top 20% of the projects ever sponsored by USAID. USAID had the opportunity to give us a direct extension so that we could continue on with our work – turning some of our work into sustainable habits by companies/farmers and taking everything to the next level. What do you think they did? They wound down our project, put it out for rebid and then had a bunch of companies submit proposals for a new ag project. A different contractor won and by the time they mobilized & hired new people (most of them were our people), much momentum was lost and hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted.
To summarize our project in Bosnia – it was wildly successful. Even today I am still proud of the work we did there and believe that we had a multi-generational impact. We had a great team, an excellent boss who was a great manager & leader and ARD was a fantastic contractor with whom we worked. It could have been even more successful if certain people had stayed in their lane and let us do the job we were hired to do.
THE ABOVE INFORMATION COVERS MY FIRST THREE PROJECTS WITH USAID. I HAVE HIT MY MAX ON WHAT I CAN TYPE ON THE BOP EMAIL SYSTEM, SO I WILL SUBMIT ANOTHER EMAIL COVERING THE SECOND TWO PROJECTS.
